Murder Your Darlings Page 2

  ‘I’m hopeless, aren’t I? Never quite got the hang of this bloody thing. And you’re always so helpful, thank you.’

  Once they had sorted out their cappuccinos and espressos and teas they headed back into the courtyard, to relax on the faded white deckchairs or sun themselves on the upright wooden benches that stood against the wall of the villa. Soon they were joined by the three ladies of the art group, who had been painting al fresco this morning, on the sloping lawn beyond the barnlike dining hall that stood at the far end of the courtyard. From this neatly mown green demesne there were wonderful rural views to wrestle with, out across the Umbrian/Tuscan countryside to the distant blue-grey outline of the Mountains of the Moon. An abandoned chapel, a study in glowing terracotta, lay above woods and sunflower fields on the high ridge to the left. Far away down the valley to the right, where the hills were covered in deep green forest, sat the grey turret of a castle. Fortunately, you couldn’t see the battery chicken farm directly below the villa, though if you knew what to listen for, you could hear the awful squealing of the trapped birds first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

  Francis was tempted to join in the mid-morning banter, as the writing group let off steam or asked the art group how they were getting on and the art group responded in kind. But then he decided to have five minutes in the sunshine on his own. The teaching was always more intense than he allowed for, especially if he had to keep the peace with such disparate spirits as this lot.

  Snooty, self-satisfied Poppy was accompanied on this week by her quiet, dignified, if somewhat portly husband Duncan, who had told the group that he had no work in progress and nothing to write about anyway. ‘Yes, you have, darling,’ Poppy had cut in. ‘Your memoir. His life as a diplomat,’ she added, ‘which is absolutely fascinating. Culminating in two postings as ambassador.’ That she was writing her own memoir of their life together was not supposed to put him off, even though she had already regaled the group with some of the choicest anecdotes: the dinner party in Sierra Leone where no one had turned up, not even the guest of honour; the Bulgarian butler who had turned out to be a hitman; the not-so-discreet wife-swapping among the international diplomatic corps in Saudi Arabia.

  Then there was forty-something civil servant Roz, who was looking for a new direction in her writing, and – she cackled, huskily – in life. Her best chance of that here was probably bluff, tanned, fifty-something Tony, who had joked that if he wrote honestly about his life he’d have to shoot the reader (the ladies had privately nicknamed him ‘the spy’). And that was it: a group of eight, an excellent number, Francis thought, in that it was big enough to have a range of different perspectives, yet small enough that they didn’t spend all morning reading back their various efforts at composition.

  The oddest was undoubtedly Liam, the eccentric Irishman, such a caricature of the type that Francis would have ruled him out as a ‘realistic character’ in any exercise on that subject. During the introductory session yesterday, when Francis had asked them all what they were working on at present, Liam had told them that his memoir was about drugs and politics, but particularly drugs.

  ‘So what is it?’ Poppy asked. ‘A been-there, done-that, got-the-T-shirt and learned-my-lesson type of memoir?’

  Liam laughed. ‘So what lesson am I supposed to have learned?’

  ‘The dangers of drugs, I imagine. The harm you can do to yourself.’

  ‘Bollocks to that!’ Liam replied. ‘I’ve never done any harm to myself. Quite the opposite. I’ve expanded my sensibilities.’ This had led to a five-minute discourse on the wonders of drugs, how the world would be a better place if they were all legalized immediately; more than that, if ordinary people made a habit of taking them regularly. ‘Can you imagine,’ Liam said, ‘if the politicians, rather than being forced to lie about how they’d never taken this or that illegal substance, admitted that they had of course, at college, or as young people, like anyone else. That they’d enjoyed them. That they continued to enjoy them, like fine wine. If they all got stoned at those conferences abroad, the G7 and Davos and such like, the world would be a better place. Just imagine if all those fellows from the EU just sat out in a sunny field in Switzerland and got wrecked on some Grade A sinsemilla. The problems of Europe would be solved in a jiffy. Dontcha think?’

  Poppy had laughed at this, a measured tinkle. ‘A most interesting point of view, Liam,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not a feckin’ point of view, Poppy, excuse my French,’ he replied. ‘It’s the obvious truth.’ His memoir wasn’t so much a memoir about drugs, he went on, but a manifesto for drugs.

  ‘So what do you say to the parents of the eighteen-year-old girl whose life has been cut short by a dodgy ecstasy tab?’ Poppy asked.

  ‘It’s not an ecstasy tab,’ Liam scoffed. ‘It’s an E. OK. A “pill”’ – he drew the quotes with his chubby fingers – ‘known as an “E”. What I would say to them is this: if only drugs were legalized, they would be properly controlled and there would be no more “dodgy ecstasy tabs”. Any more than the whisky and brandy you buy in pubs is likely to have meths in it, as it did during Prohibition. Or the abortions you get in UK hospitals are going to kill you, as they did before David Steel’s law. It’s the illegality that’s the problem, not the drugs themselves.’

  Over drinks before dinner last night, Poppy had given Francis her opinion of Liam. ‘A most original person,’ she’d said, tight-lipped. ‘Though it can’t be good for that young American girl, listening to all that nonsense about drugs.’

  ‘She’s twenty-three,’ Francis replied. ‘She has an M.Phil from the University of Oregon. I’m sure she knows all about drugs.’

  ‘I just hope he hasn’t brought a whole load with him,’ Poppy countered.

  Why do you ‘hope’, you bossy creature, Francis thought. ‘I’m sure he hasn’t,’ he replied. ‘Customs and all that.’

  Now he lay back in the warm sunshine, closed his eyes, and eavesdropped on the chit-chat. To his right, he could hear Duncan talking to Sasha about Ghana, where some of her ancestors had come from and he had once been posted as a First Secretary. To his left, Diana, as an old Villa Giulia hand, was giving advice to newbie Roz about where and how to go, if she wanted to walk to the pretty little nearby town of Civitella this afternoon. It was, she said, her very favourite local walk, though sadly, even with the new hip she’d had put in three years ago, she was unable to do it anymore. ‘We’re all getting older, that’s the trouble. I’ve been coming here for over twenty years. We were quite sprightly when we started. Hard to believe, but we were.’

  When they returned to the table under the vine, it was Liam’s turn to shine. ‘As I mentioned to you before,’ he said, ‘I’m a single fellow with no siblings, so I’ve no immediate family to hate, apart from my ma and da, and they’re dead and gone now. So I guess all I’m left with is memories.’ He sighed deeply. ‘I did this one as a poem.’

  ‘OK,’ Francis replied, smiling to conceal a surge of irritation. This was supposed to be a prose exercise and the Irishman knew it. Francis had already begged him to stop doing ‘poems’, which were hardly poems anyway, more like the modish chopped prose that so often passed for poetry these days. ‘Let’s hear it.’

  Liam gave the group the beam of the creator sharing his work, took a deep, theatrical breath, and began:

  ‘Da.’

  There was a long pause, as Liam’s bright brown eyes looked slowly round the group, and his right forefinger rose up in an arc towards his nose. Then:

  ‘The official bastard,’ he continued in a near-whisper.

  With his God behind him

  The whip always to hand

  Or the slipper

  ‘Take your medicine, lad.’

  Yet his struggle

  Not with me

  But

  With his overlord and master

  The British State

  Was the one I grew to understand

  And share

  Ho
w bravely he fought them

  In secret

  Out in the training camps

  At crack of dawn

  In the rain and the wind

  The words of Padraic Pearse

  ‘In bloody protest for a glorious thing’

  Always in his ears

  He who took his own medicine

  From his

  Da

  Who took his

  From the whip hand

  Of the Black and Tans

  The British dregs

  In silly uniforms

  But when I saw him

  Laid out on the mortuary slab

  My own tears came

  Why had they waited all these years

  For this lifeless hulk

  With the all-too familiar wrinkles

  Round his dead brown eyes

  The white hair curling

  Like wood shavings

  And the cruel thin mouth

  Da

  On the slab

  Da

  On the slab

  Da

  On the slab

  Da …

  Liam faded away theatrically, his last ‘Da’ a whisper. There was silence.

  ‘Wow!’ said Sasha, clapping. ‘That was powerful, Liam.’

  ‘Thank you, my darling.’

  ‘It was indeed,’ said Tony.

  ‘Thank you, Liam,’ said Francis. It wasn’t the right moment for an honest critique so, with a studiedly thoughtful nod of approval, he threw the piece open to the group.

  ‘It’s funny,’ said Poppy, after the initial round of praise was over. ‘These feelings that you had, Liam. Because I loved my father. But then I suppose he never laid a finger on me, and was always very kind and supportive, whatever I was doing. And even though he was away a great deal, on army business and so forth, he always had time for us when he came back. He’d strip off that smart uniform and be a regular Papa. So we loved him, in a very uncomplicated way, unfashionable though that may seem.’

  Liam gave her a quizzical look. ‘Did you say he was a general, Poppy?’ he asked, in his soft Irish brogue. This was pure mischief, as if Poppy had told them her father was a general once, she had told them twenty times. ‘The General Anecdotes,’ Roz had called them, last night, when Poppy and Duncan had retired to bed, and a group of them were sitting round drinking in the library. ‘I don’t mind the Diplomatic Anecdotes, they’re moderately interesting, but if I have to listen to another of the effing General Anecdotes, I will quietly scream.’

  ‘You know he was, Liam,’ said Poppy, and for a moment her smile froze. Then she was back in upbeat mode. ‘Is it time for lunch? I feel a glass of Pinot Grigio coming on.’ She turned to Sasha and gave her a stagey wink. ‘Hard work, this writing lark, isn’t it?’

  ‘It is,’ Sasha agreed. She stretched out her young arms and yawned like a cat.

  Back in the sunny courtyard, the guests helped themselves to wine and beer, justifying themselves noisily.

  ‘We are on holiday.’

  ‘Are we? I thought this was supposed to be a writing course.’

  ‘Don’t they say that an author is never on holiday?’

  ‘Always on holiday, more like.’

  Laughter.

  ‘And what about us artists?’ came a North Country accent.

  ‘You lot are definitely always on holiday.’

  ‘Actually painting is jolly hard work.’

  Lunch at Villa Giulia was famously delicious. Scottish Diana had told Francis several times that Benedetta’s food was one of the key reasons she came back year after year for Gerry and Stephanie’s September writing and art fortnight. Over the summer months the villa saw many types of visitors, from would-be musicians in April, wannabe cooks in June, to parents with small children in July and August. They all raved about the nosh. Benedetta had, as the Italians put it so wonderfully, le mani d’oro – golden hands. ‘And so charming and beautiful with it,’ Diana said. ‘Have you met her yet?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘I’ll introduce you.’

  There was a spread of cold dishes, in which you could discern bits of past evening meals re-presented among cold meats and fresh salads. Chicken legs and pasta alongside parma ham crostini; courgette flowers in batter; glistening slices of aubergine; quarters of pear wrapped in pecorino cheese – there were perhaps thirty to choose from.

  ‘Now what is this? Chickpeas and zucchini.’

  ‘That looks alarmingly like last night’s supper.’

  ‘But all the more delicious for it,’ snapped Diana, who was not one to tolerate a single word of criticism of the regime. Roz, meanwhile, was leaning over the table taking photos of all the dishes with her iPhone.

  Outside, they sat and ate at two sides of a long wooden table that ran parallel to the dining room and was shaded at one end with large square white canvas parasols. Francis found a place in the sun opposite two of the art group, Mel and Belle, who were friends from North Yorkshire: Knaresborough and Wetherby. Belle was like a superannuated Betty Boop, with bouncy (presumably dyed) blonde hair and a figure that you might have called pert were she not sitting one along from Sasha. Mel, by contrast, looked like something from Middle Earth: short, square-shouldered, flat-chested, with a big nose and ruddy cheeks under hair that was an incongruous – and frankly clashing – orange.

  ‘Knaresborough’s near Harrogate, isn’t it?’ said Francis, making conversation.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Belle. ‘I expect, as a crime writer, you’ve been to the crime festival, have you?’

  ‘I have. The Old Swan Hotel. And I’ve had tea in Bettys.’

  ‘You have to do that,’ said Mel, ‘even if it is full of Japanese these days.’

  ‘Did someone mention Harrogate?’ called Poppy. ‘Such a lovely town. I had a very happy three years there.’

  ‘With Duncan?’

  ‘No, long before him. It was just me, as a saucy singleton, with my little business. If I hadn’t had to take over Framley I’d have stayed there forever, probably.’

  ‘What was that, Poppy? Your little business?’

  ‘Interior decoration, garden design, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Interior decoration, how interesting. When was this?’

  ‘In the Seventies. Yes, in the Seventies.’

  ‘What was it called?’

  ‘Oh, I can’t remember. Such a long time ago now.’

  There was the ping of a spoon on a glass from one end of the table and Stephanie, their hostess and organizer, got to her feet. She was a large lady who went in for colourful floaty dresses and big hats. Gerry, her partner, was contrastingly lean, cadaverous almost, with a wild, narrow corona of black hair round a well-tanned pate. Besides being co-host, he was the art tutor. He had once been a senior teacher at a well-known West Country art school. Now he had the time and space at last to do his own work, much of which was to be seen on the walls of the villa.

  ‘Sorry to interrupt, lovely people!’ Stephanie called. ‘I hope you’ve all had a wonderfully creative and productive morning. This is just to say that you are entirely free to do what you want this afternoon …’

  ‘Lucky us,’ muttered Liam loudly, winking at Sasha. This drew an audible ‘shsh’ from Diana.

  ‘… whether that’s continuing to work on your own writing or painting, reading, snoozing, going for a long walk or cycle ride in the gorgeous Italian countryside, lazing by the pool, working out in our mini-gym or taking a relaxing sauna. By the way, if you do want a sauna in the morning, just ask Fabio, our handsome handyman and gardener, and he’ll be happy to switch it on for you. If you can’t find him in the house, he’s always in the garden—’

  ‘On one of his infuriatingly noisy machines,’ said Zoe.

  ‘Cake,’ Stephanie went on, looking firmly down at the scrap of paper trembling in her hand, ‘will be put out as usual in the small dining room at four, and you can of course help yourself to tea or coffee – or alcohol, if you’re feeling naughty –
at any time. We meet for drinks before dinner at seven-fifteen sharp, and then after dinner tonight I’m thrilled to announce that Duncan is going to give us an illustrated talk on his beautiful house in England, Framley Place.’

  ‘Grange!’ called Poppy.

  ‘Framley Grange, sorry. And also the magnificent garden he has created there with Poppy, his wife.’

  The silence that followed this was somewhat pregnant, as everyone knew by now about Poppy’s ‘published’ book, The Garden That Saved A Marriage.

  ‘The garden that saved a marriage!’ called out Poppy. ‘I have copies for sale, if anyone’s interested.’

  ‘That sounds fascinating,’ said Diana, loudly. ‘I shall look forward to that.’

  TWO

  After his two glasses of wine, Francis decided to slump with his book in a deckchair on the shady side of the courtyard, the far end from the dining room, where there were three or four bedrooms in a separate building rendered in a similar honey colour to the stone of the main villa. From here you could look up the steep slope above the drive to where a quaint wooden Wendy house sat by the stepped pathway that ran up through the mass of ornamental bamboo that lay below the tall shady trees. He was half-listening to the group as they made their plans to go out or head back to their rooms for a siesta, meanwhile watching Sasha, who was offering a counterpoint to the otherwise sedate atmosphere by doing cartwheels along the yard-wide cross of paving stones that divided the gravel courtyard into four neat segments. She had changed into purple harem pants and a clinging white T-shirt, a perfect match for her golden-skinned Rubenesque figure.

  From inside, upstairs, came repeated halting attempts at Gershwin’s ‘Summertime’. It was Poppy, doing her saxophone practice. Jesus Christ, could you count the ways in which the woman was irritating? (Admirable though it was of course that a septuagenarian should be learning a musical instrument for the first time.)